Just to be fair here, the practice of applying stack ranking to very small populations was not standard across the company. I worked in Office for about 8 years

Just to be fair here, the practice of applying stack ranking to very small populations was not standard across the company. I worked in Office for about 8 years. During those years I found that: - Stack ranking is communicated up front and the process is very transparent. Managers let you know how the process works, what they're doing, how you get bucketed, what they talk about behind the door, and will discuss your "calibration card" with you (the 3-5 high and low points they'll bring into stack ranking meetings). - The curve is not enforced on the level of a development team. It's not enforced in a product group. You don't see the hammer starting to come down until you get to populations of at least hundreds of employees. I disliked the system (despite generally getting strong reviews) but it was not everywhere as demonic as it is depicted here.